Cryptology is a discipline that has been around for the better part of human history. Before the modern era Cryptology (or Cryptography) was better known as encryption. On the most basic level encryption is the art of taking changing a message from understandable to unintelligible. Encryption has been used by everyone throughout the centuries, from covert military operatives to common thieves. The most basic forms of encryption in the western tradition are ciphers. The main forms of ciphers are transposition ciphers and substitution ciphers.
A Transposition cipher is simply a data encryption scheme in which letters are shifted in some regular pattern. Most transposition ciphers are simply a jumble of letters, for example, the message “hello Judy” is changed to “elhlo yjdu”. A popular method for creating these ciphers is called the “rail fence method”. The message that is being encrypted is written in two rows and then can be read sequentially i.e. the message “GET OUT NOW”, becomes:
GTUNW
EOTO
It is then re-written as “gtunweoto”.
The other main type of cipher is called a substitution cipher. This code is created by a simple symbol shift. Our first quest hub challenge employed this method to make the message difficult to decode. Substitution ciphers are not very secure because of the simple nature of the code and the redundancy of the English language. The most famous type of substitution cipher is known as the “Caesar Cipher”. The cipher got it’s name from famed Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. He would simply slide all of the letters in his message forward (so A becomes D and B becomes E).
Overview
Cryptology is a discipline that has been around for the better part of human history. Before the modern era Cryptology (or Cryptography) was better known as encryption. On the most basic level encryption is the art of taking changing a message from understandable to unintelligible. Encryption has been used by everyone throughout the centuries, from covert military operatives to common thieves. The most basic forms of encryption in the western tradition are ciphers. The main forms of ciphers are transposition ciphers and substitution ciphers.A Transposition cipher is simply a data encryption scheme in which letters are shifted in some regular pattern. Most transposition ciphers are simply a jumble of letters, for example, the message “hello Judy” is changed to “elhlo yjdu”. A popular method for creating these ciphers is called the “rail fence method”. The message that is being encrypted is written in two rows and then can be read sequentially i.e. the message “GET OUT NOW”, becomes:
GTUNW
EOTO
It is then re-written as “gtunweoto”.
The other main type of cipher is called a substitution cipher. This code is created by a simple symbol shift. Our first quest hub challenge employed this method to make the message difficult to decode. Substitution ciphers are not very secure because of the simple nature of the code and the redundancy of the English language. The most famous type of substitution cipher is known as the “Caesar Cipher”. The cipher got it’s name from famed Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. He would simply slide all of the letters in his message forward (so A becomes D and B becomes E).
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